QnA with Bongpen

On 29th August, 2015, Kolkata Bloggers organized an interactive question-and-answer session with esteemed Bengali blogger Tanmay Mukherjee, better known by his pen name “Bongpen”. Bongpen runs the hugely popular Bengali blog www.bongpen.net, and is regarded as one of the pioneers of modern Bengali blogging. The event, named “QnA with Bongpen” saw a good enthusiastic turnout of 60 people at the Oxford Bookstore, divided by generations and fields of interest, but united by a love for the Bengali language.

Bongpen started proceedings by providing an introduction about himself and his roots. He went on to talk about how he had no real long-term plan when he started blogging, and how he has developed over the years with experience. He also spoke about how he feels that to garner a consistent audience, one must have a pretty good frequency of blog posts to offer, no matter how long or short the posts are. By his own admission, he is most comfortable writing short pieces of about 150 words each, which is a hit with his followers.

We then moved on to an interactive session where the members of the audience asked Mr. Tanmay Mukherjee all sorts of questions, ranging from the efficacy of a Bengali blog to his emotions regarding North Kolkata, and for every question the smiling Bongpen had an answer. It was a very productive three-hour span of discussions and value addition.

Kolkata Bloggers would like to thank Bongpen for taking time out of his busy schedule to come and participate in this QnA session. We would also like to thank the venue partners, Oxford Bookstore, our videography partners, The Anon. Productions, gifting partners, Honcho and design partner, CloudStudio for their support in this event.